Azure DevTest Labs: Auto-shutdown notifications

Posted on Wednesday, August 31, 2016

We are pleased to announce that Azure DevTest Labs now supports auto-shutdown notifications. After the lab owner sets up notifications, a notification will be sent to lab users 15 minutes before the auto-shutdown if any of their VMs will be affected. This will give lab users a chance to save their work before the shutdown. The notification also provides links for each VM to skip the auto-shutdown for this time, or snooze for an hour or two hours, so that lab users can keep working on the VM.

In the current release, a notification is sent through the webhook endpoints specified by the lab owner in the auto-shutdown settings. In case you're not familiar with webhooks, you can use them to build or set up integrations that subscribe to certain events. When one of those events is triggered, DevTest Labs will send an HTTP POST payload to the webhook’s configured URL.

Here's an auto-shutdown notification message sent to Slack by using Slack's Incoming Webhooks app:

For more details on how to set up auto-shutdown notifications, please check out this post on the Azure DevTest Labs team blog. It walks you through how to get auto-shutdown notifications from emails by using the Logic Apps feature of Azure App Service.

Please try it today and let us know what you think about it! If you have an idea for how to make it work better, submit your feedback (or vote for others) at the Azure DevTest Labs feedback forum.